December 1, 2013

The rather unremarkable town of Shorkot
is usually associated with the nearby Rafiqui Air Base. Many an Air Force officer has had a heartburn
on hearing of posting to a place that is sizzling hot, off the beaten track,
and has little to show except a rustic landscape interspersed with odd groves
of date palms. Shorkot stands as a last outpost of fertile Punjab,
west of which lies the cheerless ThalDesert. The two contrasting eco-regions
are separated by the ChenabRiver
which meanders a few miles west of the town.Except for the roar of supersonic fighters flying overhead, life seems
slow as the bullock carts steadily wend their way past an eroding mound, around
which Shorkot town sprawls today. Rising
80-odd feet above the adjacent buildings and surrounding fields, the lofty
mound known locally as a bhir, is
square in shape, testifying to obvious human intervention in what was once a massive
natural outcrop of mud-rock. What remains of the mound after erosion by
elements and encroachment by land-grabbers, measures about 11 hectares in area.When I first saw the mound many years ago, my
query as to what the structure might be was promptly answered by a passer-by, “Sikander-i-Azam
ka qil’a”. Always a little sceptical of Alexander’s overblown exploits – at
least in what is now Pakistan
– I decided to dig deeper, so to speak.

An appointment with a local
school teacher, the late Mr Jamil Bhatti, saw me at his house at the foot of
the mound. An amateur collector of artefacts from the mound, Bhatti had become
an authority of sorts on Shorkot’s antiquity. Since the mound is not an
officially protected monument, Bhatti thought it proper to collect various
items that surfaced after rains, which would otherwise have been pillaged by
the locals – a practice that continues, nonetheless. He had converted his
living room into a little museum, in which were displayed several copper and
bronze utensils, numerous coins, a large quantity of beads and the usual terra
cotta potsherds. His collection (now
displayed at the newly constructed, private LyallpurMuseum) has been a convenient
source for determining the chronology of the site, at least at the upper levels
of occupation.

Archaeologist and anthropologist Jonathan
Mark Kenoyer, the premier authority on the Indus Valley Civilisation, has had a
look at Bhatti’s collection.In his
book, The Ancient South Asian World,
Kenoyer postulates that agate and carnelian prayer beads with painted stripes
similar to the ones shown by Bhatti, became common in Northern India
around 600 BC. Similarly, he thinks that the multi-coloured glass beads found
at the Shorkot mound are similar to the ones found in Greece and the
Mediterranean area; these may have been brought in by Persian traders as well
as Greek mercenaries hired by Persians when Cyrus the Great conquered parts of
Afghanistan, northern Indus Valley and the Punjab between 558-529 BC.Greek figurines and coins found at the site
indicate that some Greek soldiers may even have settled at the site.The next time you spot an olive-skinned and hazel-eyed
local from Shorkot, you wouldn’t be wrong in assigning him a Mediterranean
pedigree!

Much later in 326 BC, Alexander
is said to have passed by Shorkot on his way out of India,
along the IndusRiver.
His army would, however, have been too fatigued and in much of a haste to tarry
longer than a few days. After all, his incessant campaigns had lasted several years
and had taken their toll. This was evidenced by a mutiny of his exhausted troops
when Alexander was prevented from campaigning in the Indian heartland, after
hitting BeasRiver.
It is, therefore, unlikely for these later Greeks to have left behind any enduring
biological or material vestiges during their fleeting passage out of India.

In 1906, some men digging the
foundations of a house near the mound, chanced upon a number of copper and iron
utensils of considerable antiquity and uncommon design. The artefacts were
acquired by LahoreMuseum,
and were catalogued and properly cleaned.It was only noticed then, that a mid-sized copper cauldron (not too
different from our ‘degs’) measuring 21” in height and 22” in diameter had a Sanskrit
inscription on its shoulder. Written in Brahmi
script, it reads: “The Year 83, (the
month of) Magha, the bright fifth day, dedicated by the administrator Buddha-daso-thapita
(Buddha’s appointed slave) to the community of monks of the universal Sarvastivadi
Order belonging to the Radhika Monastery in Holy Sibipura”.The Gupta year mentioned corresponds to 403 AD
which was the peak of the Golden Age of Guptas. A similar copper vessel found
in a monastery near Tarbela in 2000 attests to a Gupta cultural imprint, as far
as the Gandhara domains centered around Taxila-Tarbela area.

The citadel of Shorkot housing
the monastery thus marks an important religious, and possibly the political
centre of Sibi country, Sibi being a prominent tribe often mentioned in Sanskrit
literature.Sibi people (also written as
Sivi) are mentioned in Rigveda.A Jat
clan by the name of Sibia, still exists in India
today.

While the Ayodhya-based Guptas
had overrun much of central India,
present day Punjab, Sindh and Rajasthan remained feudal
tributaries.To keep the annual tribute
from the Sibis flowing, as also to keep an eye on possible Persian forays, a
frontier garrison at the western-most limit of Gupta influence was in order.
The Shorkot citadel may, thus, have been the handiwork of any of the first
three Gupta Kings under whose rule, the Gupta Empire continued to expand. Evidence of this citadel appears as a baked brick circular bastion,
besides other brick structures towards the north-western side that have been
exposed by rain erosion, as well as earth removal by the locals.

As Bhatti took me for a walk
around the mound, he confided that he owed part of his collection to his school
children. “They are allowed to go off from classes and hunt for coins and other
artefacts that wash down whenever it rains.You have seen the results”, he continued, almost urging me for an endorsement
of his unusual methods. I did agree that the interest of the youngsters in
archaeology must have increased manifold with such field research!

According to Bhatti, the Shorkot
mound had been disgorging artefacts from times immemorial, and his hunch was
that his city represented the continuing Harappan tradition after the functional
order of the IndusValley
cities had broken down. He hoped that more organised archaeological work could
be undertaken at his cherished site.

The erudite Kenoyer (who interestingly,
speaks Urdu and Punjabi with relish) explains that the social and political state
of affairs of the Indus Valley Civilisation started to ‘transform’ after about 1900
BC, known as the Late Harappan Era. This was due to complex processes of change,
including overextension of economic and political networks and changing river
patterns along with periodic floods, that disrupted the agricultural base of
its major centres of production. This transition from an integrated and
centralised political structure of the Mature Harappan Era (2600-1900 BC), to numerous
competing local polities continued till about 600 BC, when various Indian and
foreign dynasties started to take hold. In
Kenoyer’s words, these were ‘multiple centres of influence’ compared to the
earlier ‘integrated’ order.Shorkot,
like over 200 similar sites in Pakistani Punjab that are marked by prehistoric
mounds, attests to this localisation of the Harappan tradition. We will have to wait for the Department of
Archaeology to organise a digging project in earnest, to be sure about Shorkot
mound being rooted deep in the Late Harappan Era.

This brief Sibipura narrative
would have remained incomplete if I hadn’t seen and described the copper vessel
that was supposed to be lying at the LahoreMuseum. I was, however,
disappointed to learn that there was no trace of it and the senior staff told
me that, “it must have been transferred to India
in 1947”! Quite obviously something was badly
amiss, since I had read a research paper written in 2004 by Harry Falk of the Institute
of Indian Philology at the University
of Berlin, in which he says this about
the vessel: “Today it is on display in the LahoreMuseum”. To me, it was more than just an empty cooking cauldron that
was dedicated to the monks of Radhika Monastery.I would like to think that it contained a lavishly
cooked offering for religious purposes; perhaps it was saffron coloured rice
sweetened with brown sugar (‘gurr’) – complete with a garnish of coconut
slivers and luscious raisins – which the monks had partied on. Would not that
event in Sibipura make it one of the oldest recorded instances of ‘deg
charrhana’, I wondered?